Wanderlust - Ninjago SI-OC

CHAPTER THREE: IRON SHARPENS IRON

When Vale wakes up, the first thing she does is raise her hands up to her face.

It takes her a while - she's never been one to wake up energized -, and when she does manage to get them up in the air, arms shaking from sheer effort, it takes her one whole minute more to get her eyes, bleary from sleep, to actually work properly and see. Then, when she finally blinks the fuzzy spots out of her vision...

Both her hands are animated.

...should've expected that. After all, she's been in Ninjago for a week now.

Eating is hard.

The food, like everything else, is animated, which Vale should really have seen coming. But that first night on the Monastery, tired to the bones and feeling entirely numb, she'd expected, on her haze, for the food to be normal. For it to be real. Instead, Wu presented them with a bowl of salad - 2D, 3D lettuce leaves with shiny, red tomato dots - and a plate full of chopped pork, with tens of overlying shades of color giving it depth.

But it's still only a drawing, and Vale finds that she can't swallow anything but her own spit.

Wu stared at her openly that night, watching her push her food around but not actually try to eat.

"Not hungry," she had said, just before Kai reached over and grabbed her plate for himself.

After a second, he had taken her glass, too, and were Vale back in her world and nothing looked the way it did, she would have laughed at him.

Instead, she stood up from the table and asked Wu for a bed.

The next thing she remembers is waking up in an unfamiliar room, and for one second there, for one whole moment of bliss, she'd forgotten everything. She'd forgotten Jade and the Pink Horror and being in Ninjago. Then the fuzz at the edges of her vision cleared out and all she saw were lines and strokes and distorted light, and everything from the past day came rushing back at her.

She burrowed back into the covers and wept.

That day - the second one - is all fuzzy after that. She knows she ate - or, better put, that she forced apple slices and water down her throat - and water is so weird, here - it's crystal clear but so obviously present in the way it's drawn - Vale only remembers drinking it because she almost choked on the not-liquid and-

...and the rest of the day is a blurr.

The days after that are only slightly better. She remembers all she did in the past week, but the thing is, she didn't do much of anything. Wake up disoriented, chew the not-food that tastes just-right-but-impossibly-off, wander around the Monastery, go back to sleep. That's all she's done.

Wu's tried talking to her a few times, she thinks. She doesn't remember if they actually conversed. She thinks not. She hopes not. To not remember what she says now - she doesn't know how she ended up here, or why she's here, but whatever she says, she wants to remember. And she can't remember a much of anything so no, no, she really hopes she hasn't talked with Wu.

...it's Wednesday, she thinks. She's pretty sure they first came here on a Monday.

Kai is training outside, she knows. She can hear him through the walls of the Monastery as she makes her way to the kitchen, clad in some old - Old? They don't look old, they fit her so well, and they're the same soft pink color of her hoodie, too, is she sure they've always been here? - clothes Wu lent to her. He's quiet, as he always is when he trains, but Vale can only imagine the anger in his moves, his stance, his eyes.